Farm Life

Me with Scooter Pie Moonshadow (my first goat), my cousin Andre, and brother Justin at the Ulster County Fair.

My husband Jeff jokes that he knew I was the woman for him the first time he came over and watched me apprehend a loose rooster. When we got together twenty years ago, we were a patchwork family: I had a 2-year old and 10-year old, and he had a 6-yr old who fit right in the middle. We were a family of five right from the beginning. Shortly after we got together, I got accepted into a PhD program that would require that we move out of state. I asked Jeff what he thought, and he said: “I kind of liked the idea of us living on our little farm.” That settled it. I passed on the doctoral program and enrolled in a local graduate program, eventually finishing my degree anyway.

We live on the small farm where I grew up. My parents raised pigs, cows, and chickens here, and my mother always had a big garden to supplement my father’s meager living as a television repair man. When I was ten, I got my first goat: Scooter Pie Moonshadow, a beautiful spotted Nubian. I slept in the barn with her the first night I got her. It was true love, and I’ve been a goat person ever since.

It took a while for Jeff and I to have more than just chickens and dogs on our farm. We got hooked on traveling the world and opened an art gallery: “Farfetched Gallery” in Kingston, NY, featuring local and international visionary and outsider artists. We ran the gallery for about four years while I kept forging through a few graduate programs. About fourteen years ago, we got our first pair of Nigerian Dwarf does. In 2009, we added a fourth child to our repertoire, becoming a family of six just in time for the oldest of our children to start moving out into the world on their own. Now our older kids are partnering and starting families of their own. It’s an ever-evolving work of art:

Our life is messy and perfect, reverent and irreverent all at once.

We would probably starve if we had to depend on farming for our livelihood. I’m grateful that my career in clinical psychology and Jeff’s as a coffee roaster allows us room for the greatest joys of our lives: Raising kids, traveling, growing food, and being stewards to the animals we care for.

-Nikki Peone Pison

Fluff & Food

Farm

Forest

Flock

Flora

What WAS New For 2021

A baby Zebu heifer calf, a Maremma Sheepdog sire puppy, and more silver goats?

Okay, I guess we’re in pretty deep now.

Pixiedust

We just picked up this little 6-month old miniature Zebu heifer calf from a farm in Maryland. I’ve always wanted a mini-cow, and this little beauty will only be about 34″ high full grown. It will be a few years before we can breed her and get milk, but worth the wait!

Pixiedust with Eko

Mleko: “Eko”

A new Livestock Guardian Dog (LGD) puppy? What will ZiZi think? Hopefully she will like him. What to name him? Milk, of course! Mleko is Polish for milk, at the suggestion of our good friend, Agnes.

Flat Rock Farm Sylvan Whisper

This little silver buckling is still in Texas, but should be coming to us in May along with an unrelated silver doeling. We hope to take breeding quality silver goats to a whole new level, and add some crazy moonspot patterns to the mix.

Silver with moonspots? They will be a new line: Farfetched Moongoats

UpDATES for 2022

A keeper Maremma female (we kept one of five pups from the 2021 litter) to breed with our Maremma sire.

Lots of silver babies on the way (we hope)!

Pixie and Eko

Pixie and Eko are still the best of friends!

Pixie loves all the babies and puppies, and is the sweetest, most nurturing nanny to them all. She’s still practically a baby herself, being only 1.5 years, but she is a soulful and sweet barnyard presence. We did not realize how much we needed a Zebu!

Lakshmi & Mleko

How do these puppies grow so fast? Eko is just about a year old and both he and Shmi, who is only seven months, are bigger than our full-grown female Maremma. Eko is topping out at about 100 lbs in less than a year and still has another year of growing to do. It seems like he was a tiny fluff ball for about five minutes before turning into a giant, goofy, loving furry beast.

Both he and Shmi take their farming very seriously, although they have had a few incidents with chickens who- in all fairness- were not supposed to be in the goat pen.

Pixie is the Queen of the Farm

Lakshmi: “Shmi”

We had such a hard time picking our Maremma keeper pup. There was only one male and four females in the litter, which means we had to choose from four. That was torture! Every day, we picked a different one, but ended up with our first instinct: “Cyan” (we had colored collars to tell the difference between the pups since they are practically identical when small- just white fluff balls- Lakshmi’s collar was cyan blue).

Lakshmi is growing beautifully! The other pups are also doing great, according to their new owners. The new parents of one of them (Fiona) had her DNA tested and she came up 100% Maremma Sheepdog! That was a nice confirmation, since their parents are not registered, but we were pretty confident they were full Maremma.

Here Mama Maziwa (ZiZi) is teaching Shmi to be a great barn dog. She leads by example, and Shmi has caught on quickly!

ZiZi had a long year in 2021, with a litter of puppies and being responsible for training all the pups, including the sire puppy we bought and her keeper daughter, Shmi. She was looking pretty pooped for a while, but has put weight back on and is still her placid, mature self. She has been a livestock guardian out of the box from the moment we took her home from Elva’s farm in Binghamton at 12 weeks. The Maremma breed is extraordinary. They are not like any other dogs we’ve ever raised.

Flat Rock’s Sylvan Whisper

Sylvan has grown into a handsome young stud! We are looking forward to silver babies, since he is bred to several of our does. He is loosely related to our silver does (most silver goats are related and go back to the Flat Rock line), so we will not breed him to our two silver does, Moon Shell and Shadow Thief.